(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a device for synthesizing an electrical and electronic architecture.
More particularly, the invention relates to aircraft, and in particular rotary wing aircraft.
(2) Description of Related Art
In order to make a product that includes electrical and electronic equipment connected together by wired connections, it is necessary to devise the electrical architecture comprising said pieces of equipment and the connections.
It should be observed that the term “equipment” is used to cover any component that sends or receives an electric or electronic signal, i.e. equally well a sensor, a computer, or a battery, for example.
Similarly, the term “wired connections” covers any connection means that serve to pass energy or information, such as an electrical wired connection, or an optical fiber connection, for example.
The drawing up of the electrical and electronic architecture of an aircraft is an important step in the design of the aircraft. The electrical and electronic architecture of a product, and in particular of an aircraft, has a large amount of equipment and thus a large number of wired connections between that equipment. Under such circumstances, it can be understood that each specific architecture stems not only from the various possible positions for each equipment, but also from the interaction between each piece of equipment, while taking account of integration constraints such as safety constraints, environmental constraints, or indeed maintenance constraints, for example.
This complexity explains why it is important to achieve a robust and exhaustive prior definition of the architecture so that the finished product has an architecture that is optimized as a function of predetermined requirements, including, for example:                the weight of the components of the harnesses;        the centers of gravity of the harnesses;        the time required to assemble and to maintain harnesses; and        costs which generally decrease with weight and operating time.        
Consequently, during the stage of predefining the aircraft, it is difficult to evaluate the characteristics of the future electrical architecture. When designing an aircraft, a manufacturer advantageously investigates various alternative electrical architectures and selects one of them as a function of given requirements. For the selected architecture, it is also advantageous to possess the characteristics of said architecture such as center of gravity, for example, since that has a direct incidence on the operation of the aircraft, or on weight targets to be satisfied for the equipment and the wired connections.
In one technique, an architecture for a future product is extrapolated on the basis of the architecture of an existing product. Although advantageous, that technique does not make it possible to obtain alternative architectures, and thus potentially obtain a final architecture that is optimized.
It should be observed that the technological background includes document US 2007/141899, which makes use of a network made up of equipment of unvarying positions that are interconnected by unvarying pathways along which wired connections pass.
Document FR 2 846 117 seeks to synthesize an architecture of a product part by positioning routing points in a zone.
By way of example, the technological background also includes the following documents: EP 0 696 775; WO 98/31158, US 2004/0098698; U.S. Pat. No. 6,879,941; and US 2009/0063035.